Fine Art Gallery on Alberta Street in Portland

Monthly Archives: December 2014

Showing in the Main Gallery January 3-January 27
Artists Talk on Saturday, January 17th, starting at 2 pm

Samyak “Sam” Yamauchi paints what she likes to call playful primitives – bright, colorful, paintings with images and stories inspired by her love of color, mystery, surprise, and the wonder of imagination. Using acrylic and pencil on wood panels, Sam’s intuitive process of open focus and play, reflects how Form is created out of Chaos. Her painting process is a reminder of the importance of paying attention, unattached observation, and the willingness to accept what comes and goes in life. Many years of observing young children, recognition of the unseen worlds, and a natural appreciation of wabi-sabi imperfection is honored in her hidden layers, random lines, and messy scribbles. Her paintings and accompanying titles are joyful, exuberant and offbeat, inviting viewers to make a connection with the painting in whatever way its story speaks to them.
Read & view short film about Sam: http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/article/intuitive-painter-samyak-yamauchi-painting-doesnt-have-to-be-scary/

Mary Tapogna crafts msaic lamps, portraits, sculptures and installations from 99 percent found and recycled materials. She’s long been drawn to making religious art, but likes to mix it up with secular elements. The rosaries in her current show are a natural progression from the wall of crosses at Hail Mary. “Being raised Catholic, I’ve always had them around,” says Mary. “My mom used to collect rosaries and I feel like the rosary is a very symbolic and beautiful way to guide prayer.” Some of her rosaries follow the traditional template, while others are more personal interpretations. One way she has departed on the traditional theme is to make very large rosaries, some six feet tall.

Jeff Hess calls his show of yoga inspired photographs “Bent”. Shortly after he began taking his first yoga class “I noticed how each yoga pose could be described ultimately by a simple expression, such as a single point of focus or plane of symmetry, and set out to explore what this looks like on camera.” After renting a large space adjacent to the yoga studio he was practicing in he designed a set that would allow him to shoot yogi’s from any perspective he liked.” Including from below. “I then recruited local talent to share their yoga practice in front of my camera. He then explored different ways to present them and ultimately chose to have them printed on sheets of aluminum which he find enhances the depth of an image. Bent is the result. From the artichoke-like wrapping of limbs in spine twisting to the seed-like promise of rabbit each pose tells it’s own story, circling, stretching or folding in a beautiful mathematics of limbs to reveal insight into the relationship between mind and body.”

Sharon Agnor creates cast glass and steel artwork. “It’s All In Your Head”, her title for the show’s work, speaks to the theme of life’s unpredictable events. It gets specific, while using images layered in glass and steel to ruminate on the known, and contemplate the unknown. Working with glass and steel, she enjoys the undeniable parallel between real life and the process these materials undergo as they are transformed with the stressors of extreme heat. “My glasswork uses a variety of design methods and forms of glass, from billet to sheet to ground powders. Mold making that uses plaster and silica or welded stainless steel forms, gives me the structure I need not only to cast the piece, but to add design elements to the finished piece. In the end, the glass always goes in the kiln…sometimes for days depending on the form I want it to take. I make choices during the firing that determine the outcome, and again there are parallels to real life.”